As the number of communication units (e.g., laptops, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular telephones, mobile and portable radios, etc.) in use continues to increase, this places a continued strain on already limited communication resources. To assist users of communication units in more effectively utilizing the limited communication resources, communication units have been designed to use multiple (i.e., two or more) communication protocols (e.g., 802.11, Bluetooth, various cellular protocols) and/or associated modulation techniques (e.g., CDMA (code-division multiple access), TDMA (time-division multiple access), OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), etc.) to transmit information from and receive information to the communication unit. Such communication units are sometimes referred to as “multi-mode” or “multi-function” units and are typically implemented in one of two ways.
In the first implementation, the communication unit comprises multiple instantiations of radio apparatus, wherein each radio apparatus is configured to implement a different communication protocol and/or modulation technique. The unit can maintain multiple channels simultaneously. However, each radio in the unit is typically already pre-programmed for its intended use, so the number of physical radios that the unit contains limits the number of “modes” or “functions” that the radio may implement. In the second implementation, the communication unit comprises a single instantiation of radio apparatus which is configurable typically based on software stored in the radio. However, the radio apparatus can only maintain a single channel at any given time, wherein that channel corresponds to the mode in which the radio is currently configured. Therefore, if other functions are required, an application or user must decide whether to maintain any sessions or connections that are based on the current configuration, or to drop those sessions or connections and reconfigure the device to support others.
It would be advantageous for a communication unit to having a single instantiation of radio apparatus while being configurable for simultaneously maintaining and communicating over multiple channels. It would be further desirable that the limitations of the number of “modes” in which the radio can operate is limited primarily by the software stored on the unit for controlling its configuration into these various different modes.